The Fighting Task Confronting Workers in Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Chou Yang. Foreign Languages Press, Peking, is.

Chou Yang’s booklet is of great interest because its author is familiar with the early and more recondite works of Marx and tackles subjects, rarely encountered in the Chinese literature which reaches the West, such as alienation, Hegelian idealism and the European Renaissance. He also reiterates the injunction to ‘let a hundred schools of thought contend’ and backs it up by quoting Marx’s criticism of the Prussian censorship, that ‘since one does not require roses to smell the same as violets, how can one demand that the mind, the richest of all forms of matter, should have only one form of existence?’ (Marx’s turn of phrase seems, in the context, to have rather a Chinese ring.) Chou Yang also exhorts Chinese scholars to study diligently the academic advances and findings of bourgeois writers. Perhaps we can hope for many further works of this kind out of China. l.r.